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by Daisiestdaisy (Doyle)



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 13:02:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7362448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Daisiestdaisy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world's in shades of grey until you meet your soulmate. Richard saw color for the first time a few months ago, in Gavin's office.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> For a ficlet AU challenge: dineshgilfoyle prompted this pairing for a soulmate AU.

Maybe, Richard told himself, pulling together some shred of optimism in an inner voice that sounded eerily like Jared, maybe they could both pretend that just didn’t happen. Gavin would come back from the bathroom and make like he hadn’t taken one look at Richard and almost fallen out of his chair, and they’d ignore that waitress who’d just looked _thrilled_ for them, and get back to safe stuff like lawsuits and Gavin trying to nuke his company from orbit.

The waitress caught his eye from the tequila bar and gave him a quick thumbs up. Richard buried himself in the menu to avoid her, lingering over the restaurant’s logo on the first page, a yellow and orange background with the shape of a cow picked out in abstract brushstrokes, some shade between green and brown he didn’t know a name for yet.

It worked as a distraction for himself, but sank any chance that they could avoid the multi-colored elephant in the room, because Gavin came back to the table to find him checking the exact name for that shade of cow on his phone.

“I think this is called chartreuse,” he said weakly. “But the app’s not great, so...”

Gavin sat back down, and folded his hands on the table in front of him, all very precise and controlled. “So,” he said. “It wasn’t just me.”

“No, no,” Richard said, and then realized the ambiguity in that. “I mean: no, this didn’t just happen to me. I’ve been seeing in color, uh, four months. Maybe five.”

“Since the day we met.”

He could, Richard thought with irritation, at least phrase that like a question. “Yeah, okay, since the day I met you, and Jared, and your weird assistants, and my doctor, and probably a bunch of other people.” And of all those people, it had to be Jared, right? He didn’t exactly make a secret of how his own world had burst into Technicolor when Richard had walked through the door, and he was nice, and he believed in Pied Piper, and even if Richard didn’t feel past liking-as-a-friend yet, that was bound to come with time. At least it was a place to start from. Way better than ‘I didn’t let you buy me so now you want to crush my company into dust’ as a foundation for soulmate status.

“Is there _any_ chance our waitress is your soulmate?” he tried. She was kind of cute. It would mean every piece of Hooli watercooler gossip he’d ever heard about Gavin’s personal life was wrong, but you never knew. Gavin was shaking his head, and he changed tack: “Well, it can’t be me. You’ve known me for months. It would’ve happened already.”

When Gavin didn’t speak right away, he thought he’d won. The universe had turned out to be a fair and logical place, and his soulmate might be Jared, might be someone else, but someone who wasn’t _Gavin fucking Belson._

Then Gavin said, carefully, “I already saw in color when I met you. Since I was almost sixteen, through to nineteen days ago, when Peter Gregory died. That’s why I wouldn’t have noticed any change until now, seeing you again.”

Richard stared down at the menu again, the maybe-chartreuse cow easier on the eyes than looking at Gavin after he’d shared something like that, something he was guessing not many people knew. He wondered when it had happened; if Gavin had woken up to monochrome or if he’d been awake to see the color leeching out of the world.

“Richard,” Gavin said, as close to gently as Richard had ever heard coming from him, “Richard, what are we doing, here? This changes things.”

Yeah. He guessed it did. “Are you... going to drop the lawsuit?”

And just like that, Gavin snapped back to being Gavin. “What? Of course not. Although I’m prepared to make you a generous buyout offer.” He picked up the thick contract beside his menu and passed it across the table. Richard took it. He didn’t know what the fuck else to do. “Read it. Order something. Think about it. And then I’d like to take you home with me.”

“I,” Richard began, but the restaurant’s mariachi band, with either the world’s best or worst timing, drowned him out.


End file.
